a blog about movies and politics by noah gittell

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Tag Archives: War on Terror

Hey everyone. I’m back in The Atlantic today with a new piece on the similarities between The Lone Ranger, Iron Man 3, and White House Down. Here is an excerpt: Though people often forget it, Westerns are also war movies, as they take place during the American-Indian Wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. So…

At various points during this awards season that culminates Sunday night at the Academy Awards, there have been three prohibitive favorites for the Best Picture Oscar. For most of the fall, prognosticators assumed Zero Dark Thirty would take home Oscar gold. After the controversy over that film’s depiction of torture reached a fever pitch and…

So much has already been written about Zero Dark Thirty, and yet we seem no closer to a consensus on whether the film depicts torture as producing information that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian has argued passionately that the film suggests that it does, and that it…

I am still trying to wrap my mind around this interview of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow by The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins. Here is an excerpt: The film includes wrenching scenes of a terrorist suspect being waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture by C.I.A. operatives; the suspect eventually surrenders information that…

Warning: Minor spoilers ahead. No movie exists in a vacuum. Every film is subject to political interpretations and various levels of expectations. This is especially true for the so-called “serious film,” which injects social, political, or cultural criticism into an art form created for the masses. For the American viewing public, “The Dark Knight Rises”…